Press Releases from 2011

Can living organisms survive a terribly harsh, years-long trek to Mars� moon Phobos and then back to Earth? That's the question asked by the Planetary Society's Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE) as it prepares to leave for the Red Planet later this month.

On November 3, 2011, the Planetary Society and the Mars Society are co-sponsoring a Capitol Hill forum titled "NASA at a Turning Point: Vibrant Future or Close Up Shop?" to cast light on decisions being made today that may well darken the future of space exploration.

Bill Nye, Executive Director of the Planetary Society, delivered more than 20,000 signed petitions supporting space exploration to Congress and the White House. The signatures came from Planetary Society members and supporters around the world.

The Planetary Society welcomes home space shuttle Endeavour and the microscopic passengers it carried in Shuttle LIFE, an experiment designed to test aspects of the transpermia hypothesis -- the ability of microbial life to survive an interplanetary voyage.

NASA has selected the OSIRIS-REx mission as the next New Frontiers mission, and the Planetary Society is excited to announce that it will be involved with many public outreach activities connected with the mission.

The Planetary Science Decadal Survey committee faced a nearly impossible task: to set priorities for NASA�s robotic exploration within a tight budget. They did a great job in laying out a plan for space missions over the next decade and reached consensus on their recommendations�no small achievement in itself.

NASA announced this week that the Planetary Society�s LightSail-1 solar sail mission is on their short list for upcoming launch opportunities. The missions selected are Cubesats destined for piggyback launches as part of NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative.

NASA's Stardust spacecraft will fly past Comet Tempel 1 on February 15 (4:00 UTC), which will be February 14 here in the United States. Stardust left Earth 12 years ago, an odyssey that has carried it past a comet, back to Earth, and on a course to a second comet under a new name � Stardust-NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1).